Interview with Anna anthropy

Anna Anthropy is a game designer known for games such as Queers in Love at the end of the World, and an author of the Rise of the Videogame Zinesters manifesto.

This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.

The interview was conducted on July 30th, 2018.

Jesper:	As a first question: How do you describe what you do?
Anna:	What I do has expanded rapidly in the last couple of years. Usually I identify myself first as a teacher and then only reluctantly as a teacher of game design. My personal practice has changed a lot. Now I am, as a designer, working more in the tabletop role-playing area. I used to work pretty exclusively in digital, but I got bored of digital a while ago, so now I'm working mostly on free-form structure-less or nearly structure-less game experiences. I've been doing a lot of work lately that I call game poetry or game poems. They're attempts to enshrine or ritualize different experiences that I think are interesting. A lot of it is the attempt to take my inner life and encode it into a set of rules or instructions. In the same way that poetry will take a moment and try to codify the feeling into text, I'm trying to do a similar thing with rules in a game structure.
Jesper:	Okay. I was playing, or what the word is, Light on Stone. I understand what you're saying about the poetic, but it also reminded me of the artworks of Yoko Ono, her artworks which are basically instructions.
Anna:	Yes. Yoko Ono's a huge inspiration for a lot of the work I'm doing right now. She's also my favorite subject to confuse my students with. What I'm doing now is much along the lines of having a game that’s not a system, it's a statement. In some cases, completely rhetorical. Like a lot of the games in [Yoko Ono’s] Grapefruit are completely unplayable, but the fact of their unplayability is part of the statement, part of the piece.
Jesper:	Do you see yourself as part of a history called “indie games”, “independent games” or “experimental games”?
Anna:	I think certain parts of my body of work have certainly overlapped with a lot of ideas of what we call the indie games movement or the indie games scene. I don't think I would identify myself currently as being part of that, or as being an indie game developer. But certainly that was true of at least some portion of my career. Especially while I was making digital games.
Jesper:	Some people would say that if a game is too commercial it's no longer indie, and some people will say that indie only means commercial games and anything that's not commercial will not be indie?
Anna:	Yeah, I think the definition of indie has changed a lot over the years and probably this is a sentiment that you've encountered in your interviews. There was a while when we called them independent game developers, not indie game developers. There was definitely a moment where the tone shifted where we started leaning more on indie in the sense of indie film. When I first got involved with games, independent games meant games that existed entirely apart from the commercial games industry. They represented these small authors who were making works that were mostly unpublishable or could not be published at that time. But the games industry has changed a lot since then, and even in the last decade or so there are platforms that exist now that didn't previously. The idea of what a commercial game could be and what was viable on the market has changed a lot. I think that coincided with this shift away from independent games as a site of something existing outside of the industry to something that could exist within an industry and could eventually be co-opted by that industry.
Jesper:	Yes.
Anna:	I think now a lot of the time when people use the term indie games, they're referring this idea of capital I-Indie. Capital I-Indie are commercial games made by small studios to make money and the kind of games that end up in Indie Game: The Movie. I think the culture has shifted as such that now we use the term indie to refer to this specific market of smaller commercial games from smaller studios. That was definitely not always the case and I think now the people who are making games that exist outside of the game industry have different names for themselves. Alt games is one that people use. A lot of people in that space don't even think of themselves as game developers. They're Bitsy authors or Twine authors.
Jesper:	I listened to some of your earlier talks, saying that these things aren't new, indie isn't new, queer games aren't new. How do you see this in the big picture? Do you think of the history of video games as one where there always is a commercial center and experimental games on the side? Or did something change historically?
Anna:	The former, definitely. You can look at shareware, you can look at a lot of early net games, you can look at ZZT games and you can look at Bitsy and Alt games right now. There's always a margin where people are creating experimental work outside of the system. The shift that I think happened in indie is that some of those people were drawn into the system. That the system, or the gaming industry, expanded enough that a lot of people were drawn away from the fringes and into the mainstream. We're in this interesting moment where there's a lot more conversation between experimental work and the mainstream than there's been in the past. But certainly there's always been people making weird shit, outside of the industry, outside of doing this commercially. I would argue that these things aren't new, but I think the level of access, and the resources that creators of these works have, has definitely expanded a lot. There wasn't an Itch.io when people were making ZZT games back in the day. Now there are ZZT games on Itch.io.
Jesper:	But it's funny like when you put it that way. From 2008 to 2012, as I recall it, there was a sentiment that this was a magical moment where experimental games, at least some of them, would also be commercially successful. That there was a unity between experiment and commerce, but which has since drifted apart?
Anna:	That's an interesting moment that you've picked, because this is the time leading up to Gamergate, leading up to this big backlash against a lot of marginalized people becoming part of the conversation around games. A lot of the experimental work that was being done at that time and which would catalyze that moment in games is made in Twine, and specifically a lot of trans women were making experimental works with Twine. Most of them did not make income off of that. A lot of those authors from the margins got maybe more attention, more of a spotlight in the work than they would've gotten in the past, but in many ways still were in the margins. These trans authors could be making queer experimental games in Twine but it was a game like Gone Home that made money and made a commercial splash. Gone Home is by all cis people so there certainly was a conversation. In many ways, Gone Home could not have existed without all the progressive and experimental narrative work that was being done by trans authors on the margins. But it wasn't those trans authors who were able to leverage that into any kind of financial success.
Jesper:	I see what you mean. It’s only the somewhat experimental works that became commercially successful and not the works from marginalized authors. I guess this is part of your criticism of Indie Game: The Movie, that it's about a very narrow slice of the population that works hard and then becomes financially successful in the end? It creates a very specific idea of what indie is.
Anna:	Well, they work very hard but are also coming from a place of financial stability in the first place. We can get into all my criticisms of Indie Game: The Movie but the route that it's championing, the route that all three creators featured in the movie have taken, is accessible to only a few people. And it is mostly white guys who have income or family or some kind of social capital to fall back on. That's not true of a lot of people. Certainly not true of a lot of these experimental creators who I'm talking about who were pushing the art form in interesting directions. A lot of them didn't have the resources to spend two years taking off of work and developing it to the point where it could be a commercial success. You need some way to pay the rent while you do that. All the people in Indie Game: The Movie had money or family that was willing to soak up that cost so that they could eventually have that payoff. A lot of Twine authors, queer trans women making Twine games, were struggling with rent, were not relying on their aunts as a source of income. Maybe some of them had Patreons that allowed them to achieve, if they were lucky, basic subsistence. But you need a lot more than basic subsistence in order to have a development cycle of the kinds that produced the games in Indie Game: The Movie. One of the reasons that movie is really frustrating to me, is that it focuses on this one narrative that's accessible only to a few people. I think at a cultural moment the narrative of capital I indie was solidifying, and the idea became that you could take out a loan or you make a bunch of money at Microsoft. I believe that's Jonathan Blow's background. You have money saved up, you create a studio, you work, work, work for a couple of years and then you release the thing commercially. You can find a publisher to sell it to, you release on like PlayStation or Nintendo Switch or something. Then you're a millionaire.
Jesper:	This makes it sound so easy.
Anna:	The narrative is that it's doable. And it is doable. Not to discount that it is work to do that much development, to have a game be commercially successful, but that particular route requires a lot of resources that some people, statistically, systemically, have less of than others. It's a very white, male-centric narrative of how to succeed in indie games, how to be an “indie game developer.” For me that was frustrating, because at the time that movie came out, a lot of the people who I knew who were doing the most interesting and experimental work in games were marginalized people who could have never afforded development process like the kind that Edmund McMillen or Johnathan Blow or Phil Fish did. I think a lot of my feelings about the movie were colored by the fact that a friend of mine, Spinach Williams, was working on a documentary about what we would probably now call alternative or alt game developers. He launched his Kickstarter the same week that the Indie movie did, and it was very overshadowed by it. I spend a lot of time thinking about how different the narrative might be if that had been our documentary about what outsider games look like, instead of this movie about a bunch of white guys risking it all and striking it big.
Jesper:	But I guess the success of Indie Game: The Movie was also because it fit very well into existing preconceptions of indie-ness or art?
Anna:	It fit an existing narrative of entrepreneurship. Which again, is a narrative that mostly faces white, middle class American, the idea that if you work hard enough and you have a great idea, you can become a millionaire. It ignores the fact that there's a lot more to it than that. There are a lot of resources. There's a lot of access that is required to fulfill that narrative. When Indie Game: The Movie came out, it was very much playing to an idea of success that we have in America that we position as being proof of a meritocracy, that doesn't exist, because the narrative erases a lot of the details. There are systemic reasons why some people can more easily be successful entrepreneurs than others.
Jesper:	You can also tie it into notions about art. There is an idea, of course, that art exists outside money. If you make poetry, the creation of poetry is seen as something that's outside financial concerns. But then the problem becomes who's going to make art? Most artists or poets don't actually make much money. In fact, it is a different version of the same thing. You can write a novel if your family is rich or you have an inheritance. That actually has been pretty common too. And then there's effect that when we start thinking of games as art, we want games to be taken seriously, we also import some of that business model from art, where you can't really make money off it, but in the best case, you get to the “adjunct teaching business model”.
Anna:	Yeah.
Jesper:	Which is also where you are to some extent?
Anna:	Yes. There's the question: if people are making all this experimental work how do you actually spin that into making some sort of money? This is a question that artists have more traditionally wrestled with for a long time. Artists have built an infrastructure for selling works and getting paid for them. When you have works that are primarily digital, the traditional model of art collectors and selling art doesn't quite work the same way. I've, as you've observed, seen a lot of independent and alt games developers, artists, pursue the strategy of, "You go and you get hired to teach game design." This is where I am, but for all of my career and all of the work that I've produced and all of the themes and books that I've created, that has been heralded as, "This is an important work. This is pushing the medium." For me the most viable way to actually make my living off of doing that was to get a career in something that's adjacent to that, teaching. That's frustrating for me. I am of course really thankful for the position I hold and it's great, etcetera. But I'm not making my income making games and doing game art. It's just not viable for me and so I'm teaching. That's where we find a lot of some of the most interesting and progressive game designers. The only way they're able to monetize their work is through teaching kids about video games.
Jesper:	Concerning business model terms, it seems that now there's a lot of positive feelings towards say, Itch.io. I think some of your early work was on Newgrounds, right? Later Patreon and Itch came around. Do you have strong opinions on those different business models, like advertising, or the personal support of Patreon, or something like Itch.io?
Anna:	I think people should get paid to make their art. I think Itch.io is wonderful in that it's very developer facing and developer supporting. As opposed to something like Steam, Itch is very accommodating of authors in a way that is really wonderful. We've needed something like it for a long time. But no one's making a ton of money off of Itch. To get back to Newgrounds, some of my early works were paid for through sponsorships because there was a moment in Flash Games when that was a viable option. Adult Swim paid me an obscene amount of money for Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars at the height of the Flash Games bubble. But like any bubble, it burst. Flash as a platform has largely gone away so that moment closed up. That left me in a position where I needed to figure out how I was going to pay my rent when my main source of income was taken away from me. A lot of these models that are available to outside authors are unsustainable in the long term. At least, as far as paying the bills goes.
Jesper:	Many of your games use old game tropes. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars uses the structure of an old game, Wizard of Wor and some of your other games were cut-up or combined well-known mechanics. What does it mean when you use old game tropes? Are you just taking things from the past, or do you see yourself as commenting on the old games, or are you commenting on the player's relation to the game?
Anna:	All three, definitely. A lot of that time in my practice I was more formal and interested in formal game design and the history of games as a form. I still have an interest in games as a form, but I was working very closely with the vocabulary of games and game tropes that we've built up over a long time. My goal was often to comment on that, and to put my work in conversation with it. To take a game like Spider-Queens of Mars, which lifts a lot of ideas directly from old arcade games. I see Jeff Minter being in a similar space.
Jesper:	Yeah.
Anna:	It's almost as though I took a mechanic, a system from this game, collage style. A lot of what was important for me was the idea of taking tropes and norms of games and marrying them with a context that was very queer and very unrepresented in games. Lesbian Spider-Queens in particular, thematically but also in a mechanical sense is about the experience of topping and in the way that it explores ideas of control and ideas of managing or controlling a space.
Jesper:	I was playing Mighty Jill Off today, but though from the same time, it also feels slightly different from Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars?
Anna:	That game, I will say, was also designed to be a fun arcade game at the same time. But I want to be clear that I'm not saying just that it was created for this high and mighty artsy fartsy reason. It was, but a lot of effort was put into something that can be appreciated as both a really engaging arcade game and also on a level where it's very much about an aspect of queer experiences.
Jesper:	To me is also what's interesting about some of your work. There are many experimental political games that are not that playable in a traditional sense of allowing players to become better over time and improve their skills. But in fact, some of your games allow you to do that very well. In A Game Design Vocabulary, you have even written theory on verb development that I use to teach the students how to make traditional games. You make political and experimental games but then some of your games also use that traditional game structure very clearly. But what is that relation? What does it mean for you to make games that you can become better at versus games that prevent you from doing that?
Anna:	To be clear, that's an aspect of my work that I was heavily invested in at one time, but is not reflective of the work I'm doing now.
Jesper:	Okay.
Anna:	Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars is a game that you can get very good at and you can develop skill at. I think at that point in my career I was really interested in understanding games and game balance in a formal way. I was working within a lot of existing systems and frameworks. But my background is as a writer, not as a game developer. It's really useful in storytelling to have a story structure, an existing one, to hang a story from or to hang more subversive elements from. For me a lot of the fun I was having at that point was creating these games that in many ways borrowed a lot of traditional structure, traditional ideas about progression, and using them to almost force or maybe coerce or trick gamers into engaging with the themes and story of my works, because they were presented within a structure that was very familiar to them. And Mighty Jill Off is a great example as is Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars. I like the idea of saying, "Okay gamers, you can play this fun game and get good at it and have your skill based experience, but you have to do it while being assailed with this narrative that's super-duper gay." This idea that in order to buy into the systems of the game, you also have to acknowledge that these systems are being used in the service of something very, very queer. A lot of my initial excitement for games as a form was to try and insert a lot of stories and representation of myself that I didn't see existing in games in a really big way. Again, this was long before Gone Home, before Life is Strange. Queer representation in mainstream games today is not great but it exists, whereas at that moment there wasn't any of that. There's almost a Trojan horse element to it. It was a way to sneak into the canon by presenting these characters in a way that felt very approachable as games.
Jesper:	I was interviewing Tale of Tales. They talked about how they usually don't like the goals in games. They like the stories and the environment, but they don't like it when you're challenged. They think that is a negative aspect of games that destroys certain kinds of experiences.
Anna:	Yeah. I've had a similar thought. Right now I'm pretty over a challenge as a driving idea for a game.
Jesper:	What's your thinking on that? Do you feel that if people are challenged, we lose some people who aren't really into games, or is it that as a player you focus on the wrong things?
Anna:	At that time in my practice I thought there were interesting things to be said about challenge. Mighty Jill Off really has things to say about challenge and the way it characterizes the relationship with the game and the relationship with the developer. And putting that in the context, specifically in a context of Kink, and the idea that there are interesting ways to understand what challenge is doing as an experience. But today I find myself really frustrated with a lot of games that are texturally very interesting but have a challenge barrier, a gate to them. I think skill as a concept in games is very inaccessible or inaccessible to many audiences. Being able to see the end of a contemporary mainstream game, let's say Wolfenstein, requires a lot of different skills. It requires understanding how to use a contemporary game controller and a lot of those are very complicated. They have a lot more buttons than they used to. I will regularly see people who are not gamers be confused by shoulder pads. A lot of tropes need to be learned. There's a lot of skill in manipulating those interfaces. There are a lot of systems that are familiar to someone who plays a lot of that kind of games, that are not going to be familiar to someone who does not. There's a whole history of different tropes. Design tropes, mechanical tropes that are ubiquitous within contemporary games can be really confusing if you haven't learned those while growing up, for example. In my experience, I find challenge just excludes a lot of people from experiencing a work fully. I find it frustrating as a player also because often there are games where I'm interested in the game, in the worlds, in the texture of the experience. Hollow Knight is a good example.
Jesper:	Yeah.
Anna:	Hollow Knight is such an interesting world; the world is built in this slow burn trickling of interesting information. I would love to explore that world and understand how parts of the story fit together but I reached a point playing that game where the skill facet just became a wall, and for me it just ended. I didn't get to complete that experience. The experience then became scrubbing through YouTube videos of the game. I find myself regularly frustrated with all of these game worlds that I think are really interesting, but have a barrier that excludes me.
Jesper:	Another example is Cuphead recently. Many of people found that visually attractive but the actual game was quite hard.
Anna:	There was this moment where Cuphead came out and Celeste came out. These two games had very different approaches to challenge and to what the requirements for beating that challenge looks like. Cuphead is really gorgeous and interesting and has an interesting animation style that a lot of people want to see. I have looked up YouTube videos of Cuphead just to see all this animation because I know that I am not going to be up to the skill barrier of the game. But the developers of that game say, "We designed this experience one way. You have to play it this one way or you don't get to experience it." That one way is only accessible to a particular subset of people, a fraction of a larger audience. What's so interesting to me about Celeste is that they started from the same point of having a work where they spent all this time fine tuning this one experience, this one path of the game, but are able to recognize that that path excludes a lot of people and providing the means to adjust those requirements to make them more open to other people who wouldn't otherwise see the full game. Celeste does something I would love to see more games do, mainly that the difficulty options in Celeste are contextual. The player knows what it means when they change the speed or change how stamina works. It's not opaque. In a lot of the ways in which games tend to do difficulty is fully opaque. At the beginning of the game you choose easy mode, you choose normal, or you choose hard. You haven't played the game; you have no context for what that means. And even if you have, you don't know whether easy just gives you more lives, whether it adjusts the way enemies behave, whether it cuts off harder levels that are just cut out of the game. It's fully opaque. You can't make an educated decision or a meaningful contextual and informed decision about what your experience of the game is going to be. What's really exciting about Celeste's approach, and why I'd like to see it in more games, is that the player is involved in the conversation about what the experience of the game will be. This is why something like Cuphead frustrates me. The idea that the author dictates, "Your experience of the game will be this one experience. That's it. You have to have that experience." This is why a lot of my work has shifted into less structured, more free form, into tabletop work which is inherently more player collaborative. Because it frustrates me to see games erase the collaboration with the player.
Jesper:	That’s really interesting. But isn't it there a tension here? I can make two very positive arguments. One argument is that games are an art form. We want to allow people to express themselves through games and put their vision in a game. The other argument is that a game should allow different kinds of uses depending on the user. But those two arguments can be mutually exclusive, right? In one case the game is a personal expression; a fact that cannot be changed. In the other case, the game is more like a tool that a player can use for different reasons.
Anna:	I think a game can still express what it's expressing without it having this arbitrary gate on who is allowed to have it expressed to it. And I understand. I get the argument for why authorship is king. Like, "If I design this game this way, you experience it this way." I just don't think it's a very compelling argument. I think it reinforces again who is allowed to be this inner circle of being able to experience games and participate in the conversation and culture around them. You are trying to express a particular idea, but if you're expressing it in a way that gate keeps who is allowed to experience it, I don't think that's interesting art. I don't think that's good art.
Jesper:	You also write about democratizing game development and game use. But some experimental games also require a lot of knowledge. Not game knowledge, but the knowledge required to parse experimental artwork, which is also tied to cultural and educational capital. Can some of these ideas of how to create a democratic video game also create an elitist video game?
Anna:	It’s true that there are a lot of different kinds of skill. Right now for me, a major frustration is we hang our games on one kind of skill. A skill of having reflexes, being able to think the right way, having all this built-in knowledge and training in performing video game systems. I would love to see more works that require social skills. I would love to see more works that require introspective skills. What's sad to me and what's frustrating to me is the fact that whenever we talk about skill in games, it means one thing. It means a thing that you either sort of have or you don't. The thing about the way skill is often gated in games is that it doesn't offer a lot of way to learn or develop that skill. This is an argument that someone, maybe Patrick Klepeck, was making, "This is part of why Celeste, having this contextual adjustable difficulty is so cool in that it actually offers a way to begin to develop the fluency in that kind of skill that will carry forward into other games of that kind." There are a many kinds of skill, especially in art, that can be developed and that there are paths to learning, learning how to think or how to develop another vocabulary to appreciate a thing in a way that maybe previously you hadn't. I think the kind of skill that we have tied ourselves to in games doesn't offer a lot of possibility for learning that skill and developing that skill. The skill caps are so high. I think it would be less frustrating for me if there was a path into being able to appreciate those works. I don't think there really is. A work can be really intellectual and that's exclusionary in a lot of ways, but the vocabulary to engage with it can be learned. I think in hard games there's no way to learn the vocabulary other than spending years playing very hard video games. Most people who are adults now don't have that time and they'll never develop that vocabulary.
Jesper:	About the word game, and of course it's highly contentious and I know there's a whole story with Dys4ia and Raph Koster, but I was wondering what it looks like from a strategic point of view. Some experimental developers don't like to use the word game. Tale of Tales talk about notgames, and I was interviewing Natalie Lawhead who calls her work net art or interactive art. What does it mean to call something a game? What is the difference between calling something a game and not calling it a game?
Anna:	A lot of the time I've used the word game tactically, so for me the appeal of taking something that's really unstructured or really experimental and calling it a game is to force the category of games to expand to include it. I don't think there's necessarily a privilege in calling something a game over calling it something else. A lot of the work I'm doing right now I could just call pieces of writing or interactive prose or something. But to me it's more interesting to call it a game but I think it makes complete sense to use labels like that nebulously. I can't speak for Nathalie, but I think her decision probably comes from a lot of the same kind of tensions around what a game historically is and the policing around what fits in that category. That's the reason that I keep trying to push things into that category, just because I want that conversation to happen. But I don't buy into [Eric Zimmerman’s] ludic century argument that games are the most interesting form right now. I think cultural conversations are taking place, we can just choose to extend those conversations into conversations about where the boundaries around games are. I opened Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, my 2012 book, with a definition of games. And it was a definition I had calculated to be as inclusive as possible. Though my definition now would be even more conclusive. At the moment I'm not really interested in providing a formal definition of what a game is.
Jesper:	Sure.
Anna:	I think it's enough to say that a work is a game. I think there are cultural reasons, and interesting tactical reasons to call a work whatever you call it, and that in and of itself can be part of the work. It’s the way in which you choose to fling it at the larger cultural conversation. Yes, I'm ambivalent about how games are defined. Actually, I have scandalous change of mind that you're getting the exclusive reveal on.
Jesper:	Tell me.
Anna:	I have completely flip flopped on the, "Should there be a space between video and game," question. Because I used to be very hard ass about it being one word. Now I'm very, "Oh, it's two words."
Jesper:	Because?
Anna:	Because I think that having it be one word is privileging digital games over other forms of art, it's buying into that, again ludic century idea of, "Oh video games are this one important kind of culture." I think it's more interesting to situate digital games in a larger conversation around different kinds of games and different kinds of play. I think it makes more sense to produce video as a modifier on games. To say that these are games, not to say that these are this thing. These aren't video games, not something apart and other from games as a whole.
Jesper:	I see. That also concerns this idea that there's a continuity between video games and other forms of games, rather than just video games springing from the forehead of computers. What goes into the decision to make a game, say Dys4ia, pixel style? What does pixel style do?
Anna:	One of them is just that it was easy. And it was cheap. I also think that what I was trying to do in that style was to put my games into conversation with games that already existed. In something like Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, the style calls back to a lot of the games that the game is borrowing tropes from, this moment in 80s arcade games. But my first and foremost impetus for using that style was always that it was easy to produce, it was way easier to animate in, it was easier to produce things that looked cohesive. If I had had the resources, I would have loved to make my games, my digital work, look more visually diverse. Then in some cases, I did, but a lot of cases it was just easier for me as a solitary author to produce things that looked okay in a really simplistic style. It was a stylistic choice, but it was also definitely the product of real material issues at the same time. I don't think it necessarily is about the fetishization of a particular moment in 80s video games or games that look like this. It was a response to a need. Foremost.
Jesper:	What do you think it does for a player that they see the game has a pixelated style? Does this give them a different kind of response than if it had been, say, modern 3-D?
Anna:	It definitely evoked a lot of associations and with something like Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, those were associations that I wanted to evoke. I wanted people to approach this game and be like, "Oh, this is an arcade game. This is like an arcade game from a particular moment in arcade games." Because I think that facilitates the kind of comparisons in the conversation that I'm already mechanically trying to make happen in the game. I think that for some games probably, Spider-Queen included, it also makes certain aspects of the mechanics more transparent in that you can look at where the borders of pixels are, to figure out if something is going to connect or not. I think it's doing these two things simultaneously. Whether it's nostalgia, or just recognition, it's evoking that, and also it's not super expensive to do at the same time. It's an easy way to tap into a cultural current that already exists.
Jesper:	Do you mean a current of retro nostalgia or?
Anna:	Yeah, and there's a set of assumptions about a game that looks a certain way. There are assumptions about a kind of game from a certain era. If you bring out the Nintendo Entertainment System color palette, there are expectations that come with that. Like, "Oh, this is going to be like a Nintendo game. This is probably going to be a hard game. This is probably going to be a game where I collect things." Things like this. And expectations are fun to have. They're fun to have for an audience because then you can play with them. You can subvert them or use them unexpectedly. That's interesting to me.
Jesper:	Is it also an issue of showing that this is being done deliberately? If you take a 3-D engine and make a game on a small budget, it will look like a small budget game. But if you go pretty far from mainstream AAA games visual styles, then it becomes clear to the player that this is a conscious choice?
Anna:	Yes, that's part of what I was saying about it being easier to make something look good, because you could make a pixel game and people look and say, "Oh, it's a pixel game. That's fine." And not scrutinize it in the same way as if it attempted to look realistic.
Jesper:	There are very few people who do experimental, political work in modern 3-D. I guess Robert Yang would be the of exception that proves the rule. But for you, is it also something about 2-D versus 3-D?
Anna:	I think it's similar in that mechanically, a 2-D game is also way less resource heavy to produce. A 2-D pixel game is materially less resource intensive both visually and mechanically. I'm just speaking about my own work, for me that was a useful route. There were a lot of things pushing me toward making the decisions that I made because I didn't really have the means to either make something that was extremely polished looking and high resolution, or because I didn't really have the means to make something that was super 3-D.
Jesper:	Completely hypothetically, if you were given the chance and a patron came to you with a million dollars for making a game in modern 3-D, would that be weird, or would that be attractive?
Anna:	Oh, it'd be fine. I would love to. I would have loved to have made digital games that were more visually diverse, but for me, it was useful for me to both be able to design the game and to produce and tweak how everything looks, and the only way that was feasible to achieve was through the simple pixel style. If I had someone on a team who could make things look pretty and high definition, I would love to take advantage of that. I'm not married to a pixel style because of nostalgia or because I think pixels are the best. They just were the best option. They were the best route for me when I was doing that work.
Jesper:	Okay. I think that's a perfect note to end it on.
Anna:	Cool.
Jesper:	Thank you.